Note that the Wireshark wiki is being migrated to GitLab on August 11, 2020, so this link may become broken or possibly you'll be redirected automatically, I'm not sure. Note that not all WiFi cards support monitor mode and support may vary depending on your operating system.įor more information about WiFi capturing, I'll refer you to the Wireshark wiki page, WLAN (IEEE 802.11) capture setup. Plus, it’s free and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. That said, it can absolutely get the job done. If you don’t know what packet filtering is, it’s a much lower level network management task, so Wireshark can be considered overkill for simply viewing traffic on your network.

They are defined before starting the capture. However, if you do care about management/control frames or radiotap information or capturing all traffic on a particular channel, then you will either need to set your interface card to monitor mode or use an external device capable of capturing IEEE 802.11 traffic. Wireshark is an open-source tool for packet filtering. Capture network traffic with Wireshark Capture filters: Used to select the data to record in the logs. What you'll get instead are packets that have fake IEEE 802.3 framing instead. If you're not interested in IEEE 802.11 management/control frames or radiotap headers, and you only care about traffic to/from your capture device, then you don't need to use monitor mode.

You can capture packets on a WiFi interface either in managed mode or if your hardware supports it, monitor mode too.

Wireshark sniff network traffic